Babin: 5 things to learn from North America's (second) most bike-friendly city

Funny thing: riding a bike at night down the middle of one of the country’s busiest urban boulevards beside a five year old bedecked in blinking LEDs offers you some new perspectives.

That kindergartner was pedalling down Montreal’s Rue Rene Levesque last month as part of the annual Tour la Nuit, a night ride through the streets of the city’s downtown that sees an estimated 20,000 people dress in their brightest, most illuminated fashions for a group ride that is all about fun rather than athletics. I was invited to take part in the ride by the organizing group Velo Quebec as a way of promoting their weekend-long Go Velo bike festival, which also includes the long-running Tour de L’ile, or Tour of the Island, in which 35,000 people ride a circuit around Montreal island.

As Calgary is making news with the opening of its downtown cycle-track network this month, I found both the festival and riding a bike through the city illuminating (Montreal is often called the most bike-friendly in North America, except by those who call it the second-most bike friendly). Here are five things other cities can learn from Montreal about urban cycling Montreal.

Mass cycling events are awesome

There has been a boom in bike events across North America the past few years, but most of them are geared toward those who enjoy diaper-bottomed cycling shorts and burning thighs. That’s fine, but it’s a marked difference from the mood that greeted the Tour la Nuit and Tour de L’ile. On both tours, particularly the night ride, the mood was relaxed and festive, filled with riders dressed in wacky clothing and towing boom boxes affixed to bike trailers. On streets that were closed to cars for the event, people hung out of restaurant windows and cheered. Others pushed barbecues to the curb and had front yard parties to watch passing cyclists. In one residential neighbourhood, a group hauled their kitchen table to the street and held a dinner party while cyclist passed by offering high-fives.

Organizing such events can be both logistically and politically risky — disallowing cars on streets can backfire, and this year’s Tour de L’ile drew an above average number of complaints from some corners of the city. But for those taking part, the payoff seemed worth it, a memorable evening among thousands of fun-loving people that offers new perspective on your city.

Keeping kids out past their bedtime to ride bikes can be great

Throughout Go Velo, kids and families were everywhere. In fact, organizers have striven to make the events more friendly to kids over the past several years by offering shorter route options and dropping entrance fees for kids. The thigh-burning crowd was still out in force, but gearing the event to kids ensures that people who are least likely to ride bikes in urban areas get an opportunity to do so. Not only is this fun for them — seeing the exhilaration of a kid riding a bike at night is a heartwarming sight — but it makes riding regularly a more attainable and realistic goal.

Here’s how Suzanne Lareau, the president and CEO of Velo Quebec, explained it to me: “(Participants) use their bike sometimes they do 50 kilometres for first time in their life and they say ‘Wow, if I can do 50 kilometres today, I can do it again,” she said. “So for promoting cycling, it’s fantastic.”

I’ll add one other benefit to that. I think seeing kids and families riding in this way makes people better drivers. Such sights humanize cyclists, and when those parents get back into the car to drive to work on Monday morning, they are going to better relate to the people they see on bikes, and, I would wager, more patient toward them.

Patience

There was a moment around kilometre 20 of the Tour de Nuit when I pedalled down a four-lane boulevard that was free of cars when I cast an eye across the road. There I saw four parallel lanes filled with barely moving cars in a traffic jam. I took note of the looks on the faces of the drivers as I gleefully rode by, swerving across four lanes of car-free road just because I could. In those faces, I wanted to see envy, or perhaps acceptance, as those drivers came to realize their days of dominating roads was over, and a new era of sharing had dawned, where they would spring free from the shackles of their automobile and stride free into a bike-friendly future.

But no. All I saw was boredom. They looked like people always look stuck in traffic: sleepy-eyed, numb and a little frustrated by those uppity cyclists across the road.

But within that, there was something else too. I noticed it later, when I was riding the streets of downtown on a regular old weekday, when I was surrounded by cars. It was patience. In nearly an entire week of riding around downtown Montreal, I was never honked at, threatened, or bullied by a car driver, despite riding as a tourist in an unknown city.

Montreallers kept apologizing to me during my time in the city for the aggressive drivers, but compared to what I was accustomed to, I found Montreal drivers patient and fair. We often hear the strength-in-numbers theory: cities with more cyclists are safer because drivers are more accustomed to being around bikes. I found this to be true in Montreal, even when some newbie turned the wrong way down one-way streets, rolled to stops on the sidewalks adjacent to bagel shops, and pedalled down car lanes instead of adjacent protected bike lanes because he didn’t realize it was there (uhh, yeah, that was all me).

In other cities, bikes and cars sometimes feel like cats and dogs thrown in a room together. In Montreal, it felt like those cats and dogs had lived a lifetime together in that house, and now went about their days without paying each other too much bother.

Great cycling cities are made, not born

Montreal built its first separated bike lane in 1986, after years of activists making the case (theatrically, of course, this is Montreal, after all). In the mid 2000s, a safe bike route was built to slice through downtown, and it has since become one of the most well-used separated bike routes in North America. It’s no coincidence. It’s tempting to think great cycling cities have always been that way, as if Quebeckers are born with legs spinning. But it’s not genetics nor culture that made Montreal good for bikes. It’s been built that way, through a long, deliberate process: Incremental infrastructure changes, the growth of events like Go Velo, a changing of the way citizens use streets. Sure, there are differences in every city, but those cities that have become great for bikes got there because of hard work and political decisions.

Bike share

Speaking of hard work and political decisions, it’s worth mentioning Montreal’s pioneering Bixi bike-share program in the growth of the cycling in the city. Bixi has gone through many ups and downs over the years, and it’s in an interesting place. After financial management seemed to doom the company that popularized bike sharing for the world (there are currently more than 900 cities in the world with bike sharing, according to Copenhaganize), Montreal’s mayor recently committed public funding to maintain the system because it had grown into an integral part of city life — the bikes are everywhere, ridden by people of all types, the system adds to property values, and few people want to see it go away.

Montreal’s famous Bixi bike share system.

But it’s taken constant adjustments to make the system operate smoothly. Early promises of financial independence for bike sharing seems to have faded away — with the exception of New York, most systems now take some public money to keep them afloat, which means they are increasingly thought of as part of a city’s transit system, life’s buses or trains (Bixi recently posted its first surplus). Most cities have taken several years to perfect the logistics of the systems — Montreal found more users liked using Bixi going to work downhill, but would take the bus back home uphill, for example. But what’s common to most cities, including Montreal, is the popularity of the bike sharing. Lack of users has doomed very few systems. Figuring out how to serve those users affordably has been the tricky part. Thankfully, every year seems to bring more learnings for future bike sharing cities.

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